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Hopeling

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Everything posted by Hopeling

  1. Scrappers have higher base damage than stalkers, not lower. Stalkers also generally give up an AoE attack for AS, so depending on the primary they are somewhere between a little worse and a LOT worse at general group clearing than the corresponding scrapper set. In addition to the ATO thing, a scrapper's higher base damage means then benefit substantially more from damage buffs than a Brute does; for example, an Elec/Shield scrapper's telenukes will be noticeably superior to a brute's since you use those attacks during Build Up. Brutes do have a higher damage cap, but even at their respective caps the brute still doesn't hit as hard once you count crits, and the brute cap is harder to reach than the scrapper cap is. This is perhaps the reason Super Strength has been unavailable to scrappers for so long; as powerful as Rage is on a tanker or brute, it would be even more busted on a scrapper because of how much we benefit from damage buffs.
  2. Focused Accuracy is a very expensive toggle, and its bonus is relatively small. Since you can usually get plenty of accuracy from set bonuses, it's not great just for that unless your build has a ton of extra endurance. It does give very high resistance against tohit debuffs, which is sometimes useful, both on certain AVs and elsewhere.
  3. AoE is definitely the set's weakness. At least Tremor is decent now that its animation was sped up; it used to be kind of sad. Shield Charge or a damage aura definitely helps, as does Fireball, but at best it still blooms a little late. I have always thought Stone/ would pair very well with /Fire. They almost perfectly cover each other's weaknesses: Stone gives massive control (hard and soft, AoE and ST) to cover /Fire's relative squishiness, while /Fire gives endurance and extra AoE damage to fuel Stone/'s fast attacks and help it get through crowds. But I can't stand Burn without a taunt component, so this combo might be better on a brute. I actually did make a Stone/Fire brute recently, and he's just as excellent as I had hoped.
  4. The original devs already did that. Most attack powers follow the design formulas, and by those formulas Fire really does get more damage than most sets, since its DoT damage is "free" on top of what the formula would give. The problem is, ignoring activation time is objectively the wrong way to design powers, since in practice animation time is extremely important, and even the original devs eventually recognized that ignoring it was a mistake. Plus, FM isn't the only set around that gets to "cheat" on the design formulas, and there are also structural issues with it like the fact that it has only one decent (not even great, just decent) AoE attack in a game where almost all fights are multi-target, and that DoT damage is worse than the same amount of instant damage. So even if we're not worried about DPA and what high-end attack chains look like, it's still 'only' upper-middle of the pack for actually killing things, and has no debuffs or control to back that up. Relatedly, I like /FM better on tankers than FM/ on scrappers, precisely because it gets a second AoE attack in Combustion. I wouldn't say FM/ is anywhere near a bad set; it's not even the worst Scrapper primary. It's just kind of vanilla, clearing spawns at average-ish speed without any particular strengths or exciting things to call its own.
  5. Mainly inspirations. On /WP or /Fire I try to keep a few purples around for rough moments; on /SD or /Inv I keep a few greens. I'm also not above using /ah to load up between missions; I often zone in with a tray that looks exactly like my avatar. Passive regen is also more important than you might think; 300%ish from set bonuses and uniques means you can take about twice as much sustained damage as you could with just unslotted Health. Every 100% regen amounts to a free Respite every 60s, more if you have +HP from powers or accolades. War Mace specifically is also very good at juggling enemies. Picking out either the hard-hitting boss or the annoying-debuff minion/LT and keeping them on their back until they die really reduces the danger.
  6. I'd slot more endredux in your attacks. Two blues and two reds is probably better than one blue and three reds at this point; you can always carry red inspirations to make up for the difference. Frankenslotting would also work. With a typed defense set, I'd consider dropping Defensive Sweep at this point, and getting a sixth slot in some of your other attacks. Unless you're going to use the Numina/Miracle uniques, 3 slots in Stamina and 1 in Health will almost certainly serve you better than 2+2. I would definitely turn off Tough and possibly Weave until you can get them slotted more, maybe toggling them on situationally in hard fights. They're expensive toggles, and Tough doesn't do much by itself without slotting. Also, don't be afraid to abuse temporary powers. A recovery buff from your SG base and a stack of Recovery Serums can handle a lot of problems.
  7. It works exactly like endredux slotting, and stacks additively with slotting. But since it isn't actually slotting, it isn't subject to ED limits. This is just like how damage buffs stack with damage slotting.
  8. How much more consistency? Can you, say, run HeroStats for a session and check the results?
  9. In short, no, there's no good way to never get cascaded. You just have to deal with it. If you don't have DDR, then you're playing something other than /SR, so you have tools in your secondary besides defense, and you combat it with those. You can also use purple inspirations as ablative armor against debuffs, and if things get out of hand, moving out of range for a few seconds until debuffs fall off isn't a terrible idea. If it's only certain enemies that debuff you (like the Banished Pantheon guys with radiation powers), you disable and kill them first.
  10. If it's hitting at the same time as a teammate KD power, they can conceivably stack to make KB. A few enemies (mostly Clockwork) are also vulnerable to knocks, so even low-mag stuff will knock them back.
  11. Negative; it has knockdown. Like all KD effects, it will turn into KB against sufficiently low-level enemies, but that's only rarely a problem.
  12. Uh, are we talking about the same set? SS only has knockback on two powers, namely the two that people rarely take or use anyway. Claws and Kinetic Melee already have more knockback problems than SS does, since it's unavoidably attached to their AoE attacks instead of on a separate power.
  13. Hopeling

    Rage Drop

    The Rage crash is costing you 25 endurance every 1-2 minutes. In the meantime, you're recovering probably in the neighborhood of 2-400 endurance. If your blue bar isn't moving up, it means you're spending all of that on toggles and attacks. So Rage may be the last straw that actually drains you, but most of the issue is your other powers. What you can do is slot your attacks and toggles with more cost reduction, maybe run fewer toggles, and avoid using expensive powers when they're not necessary (like Foot Stomping a single enemy).
  14. That's actually a really neat idea. Lightning attacks already have the endurance-refund thing; just crank that up and maybe add the recharge bit. Lightning blasters in comics tend to be speedsters or power sources, so it's thematic. And it gives the set something cool of its own instead of a "boring" effect like straight extra damage.
  15. Yeah, that's going to be pretty squishy even with softcapped defense to one type.
  16. On what kind of character? My Dominator is S/L softcapped (thanks to Ice Armor). He survives well enough in most content, but feels "brittle" to play - he'll die suddenly and ingloriously if he comes under heavy fire from defense debuffs or enemies that use other damage types. My /Elec sentinel focused on S/L defense and is not even softcapped to that, but is incredibly durable, because 35% defense plus 700% regen plus 60-75% resist to all types plus hovering out of melee range means that enemies have to get through a lot of layers of protection to actually hurt him.
  17. Right, slotting for endredux helps a lot; with sets, you can pretty easily have 60% or more endredux in every expensive power, which helps a ton compared to the 30-40% you get from SOs or commons. Chasing endredux set bonuses doesn't do a lot; you might pick up 10-15% total across your entire build. If you get one, great, but a build that focuses on those set bonuses isn't going to be a lot better off end-wise than a build that just slots the recovery/+end procs and then focuses on recharge or defense.
  18. Frankly, I feel like it should be the other way around. Hibernate seems like a more suitable power for an AT that doesn't need to hold aggro and can reasonably drop out of the fight for a few seconds, while Icy Bastion seems more suited to a tank. With the history of the set, it obviously couldn't be the other way around, but in the current game it just feels strange. Frankly, I wouldn't mind if all melee ATs got Icy Bastion rather than Hibernate, but maybe that just means Ice/ Tankers aren't for me.
  19. That's OK. Higher-tier Alpha powers enhance multiple things, but most builds are only really interested in one or two of those effects. Musculature Core Paragon enhances damage, -def, and immobilize, but it's worth taking just for the damage bonus. If you have some -def and immobilize too, great, but that's just gravy.
  20. I'm not sure if that really affects the calculus, though? Rage doesn't boost the procs either, after all. If you're doing 300 DPS, of which 100 is from procs, Rage is going to add the same amount of damage it would for someone doing 200 DPS with no procs. Like, for some napkin math: say your attacks are slotted with +95% damage, and you average 6 enemies in range of AAO (+43%). That puts you at 238% of base damage. One stack of Rage brings it up to 318%. Two stacks of Rage puts you at 398%, but only for 50 seconds out of every 60, with basically no damage during the other ten seconds. But 60 seconds at 318% deals only very slightly less damage than 50 seconds at 398%: if you deal 50 DPS just from base damage, that's 50*3.18*60=9540 with one stack versus 50*3.98*50=9950, which is like a 5% increase in exchange for needing a lot of global recharge and dealing with the defense/resist crash. It probably works out better than that in practice; you're not going to waste a Shield Charge during a crash, so that really does get the full benefit (in exchange for having to wait slightly, sometimes). But at minimum, double Rage is much less attractive than it used to be, compared to single Rage.
  21. But it literally is eliminated if you don't stack the power. I'm actually not sure that double Rage with a crash every 60 seconds even results in better damage overall than single Rage with no crash, never mind the durability hit. It's at least not enough better that I'll care to build for it. Shield/ is a beast of a set for Tankers, no question. With high DDR and easily over-capped defenses, surviving the crash should be a non-issue.
  22. I agree that this is worth noting. When people say TW is strong, it's not because Defensive Sweep allows you to herd with low-end builds. The fact that TW is in front right now says more about the structure of our test than about the set, IMO. Without DS I was getting times a bit under 6:00, roughly middle of the pack. So on the one hand, it may stand to gain less from IOs in our test because it's already durable enough. On the other hand, conventional wisdom is that TW scales really well with IOs because it's so limited by endurance and recharge. I'm curious to see whether the gap closes.
  23. I was thinking about this a while ago, and I think at least two tiers would be useful: a low-end and a high-end IO build. Maybe something like: Low-End: No ATOs, purples, or procs (except KB>KD, or something similarly critical). Frankenslotting or yellow/orange sets in attacks, 20% global recharge. Add Tough, Weave, and Hasten. Add recovery uniques (Miracle, Numina, Panacea). High-End: Allow ATOs and purples, aiming to get to perma-Hasten-ish levels of recharge. Add as much defense as you want (frankly, on +0/x3 there are going to be pretty hard ceiling effects on durability here, so I don't think the exact parameters matter). 20% global recharge may sound low for an IO build, but with 60-90% slotted recharge in attacks (up from 33%) plus Hasten, it's still a large jump up from SOs. The high-end condition is another large jump. Should we separate recharge/recovery/defense, or do you want to lump them together for now? Should we include epic/ancillary powers?
  24. For a scrapper? I'd say /Rad, because it's the only one with a taunt aura. Damage auras are less exciting when they just make foes scatter. If you want a tanker or brute, they're all quite good sets, but there's no clear 'best'.
  25. There are a few +end set bonuses, like on Decimation. Neither +end or +enddiscount nor +recovery can be obtained in large amounts, which makes all of them poor things to build toward deliberately. If your character has endurance issues that slotting and Miracle/Numina/Panacea/Performance Shifter can't resolve, you are better off going for Body Mastery, Cardiac/Vigor alpha, or Ageless Destiny.
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